I am delighted to introduce Kim Witczak and Rosemary Gibson, two powerful new additions to the NPA’s Board of Directors. Champions of patient safety, both Rosemary and Kim bring a wealth of talent and experience to the organization. Their extraordinary bios are below. We are honored to welcome them to NPA’s leadership.

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Kim Witczak
Kim Witczak became involved in pharmaceutical drug safety issues after the death of her husband, Tim “Woody” Witczak in 2003 as a result of an undisclosed drug side effect. She has taken her personal experience and launched a national drug safety campaign through www.woodymatters.com. Her work has been featured in major news media such as Fortune, Readers Digest, Consumer Reports, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Star Tribune. Kim has testified before US Senate on PDUFA/FDA reform issues as well as numerous FDA Advisory Committees. In 2008, she was appointed to the FDA’s Psychopharmalocgic Drug Advisory Committee as a Patient Representative. In 2013, Kim co-organized the Selling Sickness: People Before Profits international conference held in Washington, DC bringing academic scholars, healthcare reformers, consumer organizations/advocates and progressive health journalists to develop strategies and solutions challenging the “selling of sickness”. She is an active member of the Consumer Union Safe Patient Project as well as a part of the DC-based Patient, Consumer, and Public Health Coalition making sure the voice of patients and consumers is represented in healthcare/FDA related legislative issues.

Professionally, Kim is an advertising/marketing professional with 25 years of experience in a variety of industries (e.g. airlines, automotive, fashion, and retail). She is one of the founders of Free Arts Minnesota in 1996, a non-profit dedicated to bringing the healing powers of the arts to over 4,000 abused and neglected children in Minnesota. Kim earned her BA in Business and Economics at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois.

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Rosemary Gibson, MA
Rosemary Gibson is Senior Advisor at The Hastings Center, founding editor for “Less is More” narratives in JAMA Internal Medicine, and author of Medicare Meltdown (2013), Battle Over Health Care (2012), Treatment Trap (2010), and Wall of Silence (2003). She is the 2014 recipient of the highest honor from the American Medical Writers Association for her contributions to the field of medical communication. Her writing gives voice to the public’s interest in critical health care issues of the day.

She is a board member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and serves on the CLER Evaluation Committee to advance safety in sponsoring institutions. At Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Rosemary was chief architect of its $200 million national strategy to establish inpatient palliative care programs that now number 1600, an increase from about 10 in the 1990s. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. She worked with Bill Moyers on the PBS documentary, “On Our Own Terms.”

Rosemary led national quality and safety initiatives in partnership with IHI: Pursuing Perfection, Transforming Care at the Bedside, and Rapid Response System implementation. She is a public member of the American Board of Medical Specialties Health and Public Policy Committee and Consumers Union Safe Patient Project. She served on the AHRQ Technical Expert Panel for Consumer Reporting of Adverse Events.

Rosemary has given presentations and grand rounds on patient safety at hundreds of hospitals; keynoted meetings of the National Quality Forum, The Joint Commission, National Board of Medical Examiners, American Academy of Otolaryngology, AONE, National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Federation of State Medical Boards, National Summit on Overuse held by The Joint Commission and AMA, Society of Critical Care Medicine, among others. She has been faculty for the Dartmouth Summer Symposium on Quality Improvement and was its 2013 “wizard.”

She speaks to public audiences at the New York Public Library, the AARP National Convention, George Mason University; legislators at the National Council of State Legislators; Women’s National Democratic Club, Connecticut Center for Patient Safety, Maine Quality Counts, Maine Area Agencies on Aging, among others.

Her books have been reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Washington Post, JAMA, Health Affairs; referenced in proceedings of the U.S. Senate; mentioned in Congressional testimony; noted in the WSJ, NYT, USA Today, Consumer Reports, and Boston Globe, O Magazine, Reader’s Digest, US News and World Report. Wall of Silence was translated into Japanese; the Chinese translation of Treatment Trap won the prestigious Open Book Award from China Times. Rosemary has appeared on Chicago Tonight, WBGH’s Greater Boston, Fox News, The Doctors, C-Span Book TV.

Rosemary graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University and has a master’s degree from London School of Economics.